Not that the headline is telling you anything that you, as a rabid ND fan, didn’t already know. But the Pac-10 is backing up the decision to reverse the correct call on the field from Saturday’s Stanford/Notre Dame game which said that this catch was a completion for a touchdown. The correct call, on the field, was made by Big East officials. The Pac-10 supplied the replay official.

Some selected images of The Catch

From the South Bend Tribune

Via Blue-Gray Sky

AP News, via Yahoo

Via Blue-Gray Sky Again!

Now, it’s one thing to fail to get this call right via incompetence. The standard by which a reversal of a call on the field (in this case, the call on the field was that the pass was completed for a touchdown) was not applied. When the re-play official decided to reverse the call, ESPN sought an explanation immediately because even the ESPN talking-heads were incredulous (remember, the re-play officials in college have no angles other than the ones provided by whoever is recording the game for telecast), and the re-play official explained that he (and I’m paraphrasing, but it’s close enough) thought that he could see the ball move up in Grimes’ hand after he landed, and so it must have touched the ground. The biggest thing wrong with that notion is that you don’t get to “think” you saw something and then infer something from what you thought you saw. The replay official, at least when first asked, never said anything about actually seeing the ball touch the ground. He just infered it. But that’s not the standard for reversing a call on the field in college football. In college football, there must be indisputable video evidence that supports a reversal. The Pac-10 re-play official didn’t apply that standard here. There’s no way any rational mind could watch the available video evidence and call any of it indisputable. And given the Pac-10’s recent history with video re-play issues, I’m almost willing to bet that the Pac-10 official didn’t understand what standard should be applied, thus he was incompetent. And I’m not even going to get started on the poor understanding of 6th-grade-leve physics that the official tried to apply in his “rationale.” But here’s a hint for all re-play officials in the future: If you find yourself having to rationalize a reversal, you don’t have enough video evidence to reverse the call!

So yeah, incompetence is one thing. But lying is something else entirely. Today the South Bend Tribune published a piece about the idiotic controversial call, and got this quote from Pac-10 head of officiating, Dave Cutaia:

“The replay official felt he had a shot that showed the point of the ball hit the ground,” Cutaia said in an email. “This is basically a judgment call on his part, as an on-field official might judge defensive pass interference.”

So apparently either the re-play official has changed his reasoning completely from inference to statement of what he perceives to be a fact, or the head of Pac-10 officiating has done that for him. Either way, someone, at some point, has lied. Either the original explanation was a fabrication (and really, why go to the trouble of that if you feel so confident in the ultimate explanation?), or the quote up above is an outright lie.

Essentially what the Pac-10 is trying to say is that they just don’t care. Notre Dame still won the game - a game between two bad teams with no bowl implications whatever. But the problem is this is just another big, prominent data-point in a trend-line that has existed long before video review of Pac-10 games. It’s clear that Pac-10 officiating is either as incompetent as long-feared of corrupt as long- suspected.

Further, no matter the result of the game, David Grimes has been cheated out of one of the best catches I’ve ever seen in any sport.  The still-photos don’t do it justice.  A blink of an eye before the catch was made, nobody on the planet, except, perhaps, for Grimes, thought he would even catch up to the ball enough to get a hand on it, let alone actually catch the darn thing.  And to rob him of a piece of Notre Dame/College Football History is an absolute crime.

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